Letter from The Cotswolds: Pretty little villages, naked gardens, buried bodies
In Wiltshire, in the Cotswolds Area, there is a tiny, sweet village called Castle Combe. Despite its name, it has no castle, but visiting it, I couldn’t help but think that the villagers living there (last count: 326) wished they had a fortress and moat to keep out the visitors.
It was past six [...]
Unfinished business: Inside the founding of Flagship Group
When I put it to Stephen Oddo that buying back into the tours and activities business he’d built and sold looked a lot like unfinished business, he answered rather reticently. “To a certain degree, for sure,” he said, and then proceeded at some length to explain it off as a “happy coincidenc [...]
Local grit, global impact: four Kiwi founders on building tech from the world’s edge
Some people eat to live. Some people live to eat. All startups though live and die by solving the pain points they’ve chosen to tackle.
Which was how I kicked off the panel, “Local Grit, Global Impact: Kiwi Innovation in Travel & Hospitality Tech” at WiT Queenstown. I asked the question � [...]
Kiwi legends: What fear, wonder and connection have in common
Five leaders of some of New Zealand’s most recognisable tourism brands – ski fields, jet boats, bungy jumping, conservation cruises and Māori-owned experiences – sat down with WiT founder Yeoh Siew Hoon to unpack what actually makes an experience iconic. The consensus, delivered from five ver [...]
Guardians of place: Lee Ann Muntz on culturalising commerce, not commercialising culture
A couple of months before my coffee chat with Lee Ann Muntz, a board member of the Māori Tourism Board, a line she had said in the Zoom call had stuck with me. “We don’t commercialise culture. We culturalise commerce.”
I wanted to get deeper into that during our conversation. But first, I wa [...]
Serko’s Darrin Grafton: “It’s open season right now in corporate travel”
To introduce Serko’s co-founder and CEO, Darrin Grafton, in a way that would summarise this Kiwi entrepreneur’s nearly-four-decade journey to trying to solve corporate travel’s pain points, I prompted AI.
The result – that he runs Serko “like a jazz band,” part CEO, part roadie, “10 [...]
The secrets to mastering social and commerce in the age of AI
A panel at WiT Queenstown representing Klook, Google and Fabulate shares tips and insights on what’s working and what’s not
Social and AI have increasingly become the means by which travellers discover places and things to do – and the panellists at WiT Queenstown – Marcus Yong of Klook, B [...]
The experience surge: When singular obsessions become the product
What’s your unique obsession? That was the question Jacinta Lim, co-founder and CEO of Seek Sophie, asked the audience at WiT Indie when she moderated the session on “The Experience Surge”.
It was a perfect set-up for a panel whose three guests have each done exactly that – built business [...]
Full cycle: Hermione Joye on 12 years in Asia travel
In the Chinese calendar, 12 years is a full cycle – every animal has had its turn, and you’re back where you started. Well, Hermione Joye, who has just stepped down as Google’s Head of Travel, APAC, has spent exactly a dozen years in the region and as someone born in the Year of the Rat, she l [...]
Agoda’s Tim Hughes on online travel’s broken promise and AI’s “Reddit” dilemma
Twenty-five years and, by his own count, five completely different versions of Agoda later, Agoda’s Timothy Hughes sat down at WiT Queenstown to talk about why online travel never quite delivered on its oldest promise, and why the fix for AI’s travel-advice problem might be sitting in a small co [...]
